Speaking about Paging in MSSQL - obviously Paging with ROW_NUMBER is the fastest paging for today. I just made some tests comparing it to Paging with ROWCOUNT and ROW_NUMBER is much faster. Tested on million rows. ROWCOUNT
is also fast, the main query cost there goes for COUNT(*) but still.
Also both ways do not depend on the page number - first and last pages
have the same cost.